Commentary: The US’s shameful absence at Sunday’s historic Paris march

On Monday afternoon President Barack Obama acknowledged through a spokeperson having erred it not sending a higher ranking official to Sunday’s historic march in Paris’s Place de la Republique, where 44 heads of state linked arms with French President François Hollande, expressing solidarity, unity, and, most of all, courage in the fight against terrorism and for freedom of speech and the press.

It’s an important admission, but the depths of the bungle are mind-boggling, how it happened remains hidden, and the damage is lasting.

While the mistake will be—and already has been—exploited by Obama’s predictable enemies, the truth is that those enemies happen to be right this time. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. This mistake transcended partisan politics, and a historic opportunity was irretrievably lost.

Clichéed as it might sound, in the wake of the murderous twin terrorist attacks on the headquarters of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper and a kosher grocery in Paris, my wife’s and my eyes filled with tears and our hearts with hope and pride as we watched such world leaders as Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Germany’s Angela Merkel, David Cameron of Britain, King Abdullah of Jordan, and Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority risk their lives to literally join ranks with Hollande.

The daring of these leaders, prime terrorist targets every one, was breathtaking. So, too, was that of the surviving relatives of the 17 victims of the attacks and of the other estimated 1.6 million Parisians present, especially given the frightful terrorist firepower brought to bear just days earlier, which included AK-47 assault rifles, grenade launchers, machine pistols, and 15 sticks of dynamite.

But as my wife, who is a dual French-American citizen, and I watched on television, waiting to see the U.S. representative marching, we, like other Americans, felt growing discomfort, disbelief and, finally, shame. Though the New York Times in its web coverage and CNN in its news crawls kept assuring us that Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr., was there participating, representing our country, there was no video footage verifying these assertions, and no TV or web correspondent present claimed to have actually seen him.

We wondered if he was in a back row, or if the French TV channel my wife prefers to watch wasn’t finding him because its journalists didn’t know who he was.

Like many journalists and pundits, we had been wondering all along whether Holder really had sufficient stature to serve as the U.S. representative, given that France, our oldest ally and probably our second-closest politically at the moment, had just sustained its worst attack since World War II. Our nation’s unique ideological links to France are aptly commemorated by a certain gift it made to the American people in the 19th century, the one standing in New York harbor and named the Statue of—not coincidentally—Liberty.

The painfully obvious, totally unambiguous answer to these musings was: No, of course Holder was the wrong choice. If President Barack Obama himself couldn’t be there himself—a significant if in itself—Vice President Joe Biden, Michelle Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry were all manifestly better choices. Kerry, in particular, speaks French well; is known to French audiences; and has the appropriate organizational-chart duties. (Kerry was in India, on a scheduled visit to visit to see the prime minister there. Today he has announced that he’ll visit Paris Thursday or Friday, to show solidarity.)

Attorney General Holder, by contrast, is less known to the French people, even if he does enjoy, according to the Washington Post, one of the closest personal relationships with President Obama among cabinet members.

It had been decided, news organizations reported, that Holder should represent us at the march because he was already scheduled to be in Paris for a pre-rally security summit on anti-terror measures. (Seriously? He was chosen to save on air fare?)

But the dawning truth—the subject of front page stories in Monday’s Daily News and NY Post (headlined: “Sorry Charlie”) —was that not even Holder showed up. The Times and CNN had been misled. (How has not been explained.)

As I kept Googling and doing Twitter searches throughout the day, I finally found a tweet by Evan McMorris-Santoro, the Buzzfeed White House Reporter, stating that Holder had “left Paris before rally to attend ‘urgent’ meetings, a DOJ official told me.”

I assumed that he meant Holder been pulled away to attend a meeting in Paris about an imminent terror attack—the only conceivable justification I could think of for ditching an assignment of this gravity.

I was wrong. Monday’s Daily News reported: “Around the time other world leaders and dignitaries boarded buses to get to the front of the march, Holder was taping an interview for ‘Meet the Press,’ NBC confirmed.” So his meetings weren’t quite so urgent after all.

Instead, the U.S. representative that actually did end up attending the rally was the U.S. ambassador to France.

Do you even know who the U.S. ambassador to France is? Neither did I. She’s Jane D. Hartley, an Obama fundraiser who headed the Observatory Group, an economic and political consulting group, before her appointment. I’m sure she’s a well-qualified ambassador, but she was just an utterly, preposterously, offensively low-level official to send to an occasion of this moment.

CNN’s Jake Tapper, who was present for the rally, wrote Monday morning: “I say this as an American—not as a journalist, not as a representative of CNN—but as an American: I was ashamed.”

Now let’s get down and dirty. This event was dangerous. Frankly, as it was unfolding, I could barely believe what I was watching. The heads of state left the presidential residence, the Elysée Palace, to board buses to take them to the march. Yes, the French security police said they’d checked every building along the route—and even the sewers—and there were three official planned routes, to make it hard for terrorists to know which would ultimately be selected.

But the roads were lined with buildings, all with windows and many with balconies, and, as a practical matter, security assurances only go so far. Those buses were sitting ducks in the path of a rocket-launched grenade. For what seemed like an achingly long minute or two Netanyahu was locked in a crowd between the palace and his bus, a stationary target, his eyes darting around as fitfully as those of his bodyguard. Yet Netanyahu stayed all day, later attending a synagogue service in Paris with Hollande. I guess he had no urgent meetings.

Let’s just avoid a separate discussion and concede that maybe it didn’t make sense for President Obama himself to venture into this setting. That’s a complex question and there were only 36 hours to prepare. (Though Politico called what happened “Obama’s French Kiss-Off.”) Could we really send no one higher up than Jane Hartley? Obama has just acknowledged that of course we could have.

Maybe it was insensitivity. Maybe it was American self-involvement and obliviousness toward the world beyond our borders.

But at some point an uglier inference is raised. There arises at least an appearance of cowardice. With our all-volunteer army, maybe our policymaking class no longer feels any need to lay it all on the line for principle any more. That duty and honor is relegated to different socioeconomic classes in our society.

Of course there were security risks. And this was a time and a cause that called for a top American official to face those risks, just like Hollande and 44 other world leaders were willing to do.

The rubric CNN appropriately chose for its coverage of the Paris march Sunday was “Standing with France.”

It is to our great and lasting shame as a nation that the United States failed to stand with France on Sunday.

Thanks, banks! DOJ has collected a record $24 billion in fines this year

A number of massive settlements with top U.S. banks paved the way for a record year for the U.S. Justice Department.

The DOJ said on Wednesday that it collected a record $24.7 billion in civil and criminal penalties stemming from financial fraud cases and other matters during the 2014 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30. That total, which includes about $11 billion collected by the DOJ on behalf of other federal agencies, more than triples the $8 billion the agency collected during the previous year.

The bulk of the collections made in the most recent year came from large financial institutions settling claims related to the 2008 financial crisis, the DOJ said, “including significant amounts paid by JPMorgan and Citigroup Inc.”

JPMorgan Chase JPM reached a $9 billion settlement with the U.S. government a year ago to resolve claims related to the bank’s sale of mortgage-backed securities in the lead-up to the financial crisis. (JPMorgan also agreed to pay about $4 billion in consumer relief.) Citigroup C later reached a similar deal with the DOJ over the summer that included a $7 billion penalty. A similar settlement with Bank of America BAC later trumped both of those penalties, though, with the bank agreeing to pay $16.7 billion, including $7 billion for consumer relief, in August.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement that the record 2014 fiscal year “shows the fruits of the Justice Department’s tireless work in enforcing federal laws; in protecting the American people from violent crime, national security threats, discrimination, exploitation, and abuse; and in holding financial institutions accountable for their roles in causing the 2008 financial crisis.”

The DOJ also pointed to the fact that it has already collected “hundreds of millions in fines” stemming from the ongoing international probe into banks’ alleged rigging of the London Interbank Offered Rate, or LIBOR.

Eric Holder’s business legacy: ‘Too big to jail’?

“That area of his record is terrible,” says Robert Weissman, president of the progressive nonprofit, Public Citizen.

Weissman is criticizing U.S. attorney general Eric Holder for his “utter failure to prosecute any [major] institution or person for the events that led to the financial crisis and all the ensuing social devastation.”

Holder announced yesterday that he’ll step down from the post he’s held since 2009 as soon as the president appoints a successor,

The popular vein of criticism being voiced by Weissman, and encapsulated in the phrase “too big to jail,” is the albatross that threatens to weigh down Holder’s legacy in the business realm.

It’s more than just a cheap shot leveled by people that don’t really understand the fine points and technicalities of the criminal justice system. U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, a former chief of the business fraud unit of the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, published a powerful article in the New York Review of Books last January that, while tempered with judicial disclaimers and caveats, unmistakably conveys his slack-jawed disbelief that the “colossal frauds” the government has alleged in so many civil cases could not also have engendered at least one successful criminal prosecution.

To be sure, Holder’s legacy as attorney general will be determined by a much broader record of accomplishment and failure than just his stance on corporate crime. Historians will likely focus far more on the impact he had on civil rights, including gay and voting rights; his preference for prosecuting terrorism in criminal courts rather than military tribunals; his attempt to bring more equity in sentencing and drug crime prosecutions; his apparent tolerance of vast domestic surveillance in the name of fighting terrorism; and his surprising persistence in bringing leak prosecutions, even when it meant subpoenaing journalists, including New York Times reporter James Risen.

But in the business realm, will Holder’s champions have a case for counteracting criticism like Weissman’s?

Well, in recent years Holder has certainly been punishing banks with unprecedented civil fines and penalties. Laast month he won a $16.65 billion settlement from Bank of America Corp. BAC the department’s largest with a single entity in history, for misrepresentations it made (or that its teetering acquisitions, Countrywide and Merrill Lynch made) about residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) during the runup to the crisis. Last November, he grabbed $13 billion more from JPMorgan Chase JPM for its similar conduct (and that of the companies it acquired, Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual). He picked up another $7 billion in a deal with Citigroup C in July, also stemming from alleged RMBS-related fraud.

And once we get past the financial crisis, Holder’s record looks tougher. His department came down hard on BP for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster. In November 2012, BP pleaded guilty to 11 felony manslaughter charges, environmental crimes, and obstruction of Congress, and agreed to pay $4 billion in criminal fines, even as the Justice Department continues to seek additional relief from BP in civil proceedings. (That’s all over and above, of course, the many billions BP has paid, and has yet to pay, in ongoing private litigation.)

Finally, this past July his department obtained a guilty plea from Paris-based bank BNP Paribas BNP, for processing illegal transactions with Sudanese, Iranian, and Cuban entities, in violation of the Trading With the Enemy Act. BNP coughed up about $9 billion in forfeitures and fines.

“During attorney general Holder’s tenure, the sanctions on business have increased hugely,” Jamie Gorelick told me in an interview. Gorelick was deputy attorney general during the Clinton Administration, and is now a partner at the law firm of WilmerHale. “It used to be that a billion-dollar resolution was extraordinary. Now we have resolutions at levels many, many times that number.”

So, yes, Holder’s champions will have some basis to commend his record on business crime.

But in the end, the die is cast. With each new multi-billion-dollar recovery the government wins from Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citigroup, or some other company accused of civil fraud in connection with the conduct that launched the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the more inconceivable it seems that there wasn’t also some prosecutable criminal wrongdoing going on at the time.

President Obama announces Eric Holder will step down

This post is in partnership with Time. The article below was originally published at Time.com.

By Alex Rogers, TIME

President Obama paid tribute to Attorney General Eric Holder Thursday, as he announced the resignation of the country’s top law enforcement official.

Standing alongside Holder at a White House press conference, the president confirmed that America’s first black attorney general’s would step down from his position as soon as a successor was confirmed by the Senate.

“Bobby Kennedy once said, ‘on this generation of Americans falls the full burden of proving to the world that we really mean it when we say all men are created free and equal before the law,’” said Obama. “As one of the longest-serving attorney generals in American history, Eric Holder has borne that burden.”

Obama credited Holder—who has a portrait of Kennedy on his office wall—as a civil rights defender who spent his career atop the Justice Department reforming the criminal justice code, defending voting rights and supporting the legal rights of same-sex marriage advocates. Obama also thanked Holder for his service under six presidents of both parties, calling the moment “bittersweet.”

Holder said he came to the end of six years leading the Justice Department “with very mixed emotions,” occasionally fighting back tears as he spoke.

“I’m proud of what the men and women of the Justice Department have accomplished,” he added, but said he was “very sad” that he would serve alongside them no longer.

This story has been updated with new information from an afternoon press conference.

Credit Suisse got off easy

FORTUNE — On Monday, Credit Suisse became the first bank in decades to admit it broke the law. It sounds like a momentous occasion, but don’t be fooled. The consequences will be basically nil.

CEO Bradley Dougan said the guilty plea will have no material impact on Credit Suisse’s operations. It won’t have any material impact on Dougan, either. The CEO who has overseen the bank during the last few years of the tax evasion that led to Monday’s criminal indictment as well the sale of billions of dollars in faulty subprime mortgages to unsuspecting investors is staying put.

Clearly, justice for Wall Street is different than it is for the rest of us.

In securing its guilty plea, the Justice Department did everything it could to make sure criminal charges would not affect the bank. Prosecutors went to state governments to secure promises that Credit Suisse CS would still be able to operate locally. They also went to the SEC and the Federal Reserve and made sure Credit Suisse’s broker dealer license and bank charter would not be revoked.

The Justice Department also didn’t force Credit Suisse to turn over the names of its U.S. clients because it would have broken rules back in Switzerland. But Credit Suisse’s survival is far more important to that country’s economy than it is to the U.S. Why not force the Swiss to bend their rules?

The fear is that, without any of these measures, a criminal indictment would have put Credit Suisse out of business. Avoiding that is wise, not just for the Swiss economy but for the U.S. as well. Credit Suisse has a large U.S. investment bank with derivative contracts and other ties to JPMorgan Chase JPM, Citigroup C and all of the other large U.S. banks. But were all of the precautions necessary?

According to the facts of the case, which Credit Suisse agrees are correct, the Swiss bank had 22,000 U.S. customers who hid about $13.5 billion in assets from U.S. authorities. And it’s not like the bankers didn’t know this was wrong. They set up fake foundations and kept bank records on paper, handing statements to at least one client hidden inside a Sports Illustrated magazine.

While much of this activity didn’t happen on Dougan’s watch, the executive did head the bank during the time in which it deleted e-mails and did anything else it could to cover up evidence of its crimes from prosecutors. That is in part why prosecutors pushed ahead with criminal charges. Barclays’ former CEO Bob Diamond cooperated, albeit a little late, with regulators over his bank’s Libor rate rigging activities and he still got the boot.

All of this suggests that Credit Suisse deserved some “jail” time. Plenty of smaller financial firms are regularly banned from doing certain business activities after they are taken to task for running afoul of the law. We don’t yet know who is on Credit Suisse’s list of tax cheats. But when we do, why not suspend the bank from operating in states with the most people on the list? And if that’s not possible — New York could rank high on that list — how about a temporary ban in those places from wealth management?

U.S. Attorney General Eric “Too Big to Jail” Holder could be thinking, “Let’s make it easy for one bank to agree to a criminal indictment and see how it goes.” But that doesn’t mean justice was served here. And now that the Justice Department has handed it out, every other bank will demand the same concessions.

Eventually, prosecutors are going to have to take the plunge and truly punish a bank.

Attorney General to announce hacking charges against Chinese army workers

FORTUNE — Five individuals in the Chinese military could soon be in the digital doghouse with the U.S. Justice Department.

Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday is expected to charge the individuals for allegedly using government facilities to hack into U.S. company systems. The names of the companies weren’t immediately available, but they apparently fall within the energy and manufacturing sectors.

More information is expected after Holder formally announces the charges later later today.

U.S. Attorney General closes in on multiple banks

FORTUNE — The Obama administration may have more than two years left in office, but U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is making his last push to take action against Wall Street firms, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday evening.

In the next few days, the Justice Department is expected to look for a guilty plea from Credit Suisse Group CS, according to the Journal. Following that, the departments expects to finalize deals with Bank of America BAC, Citigroup C and BNP Paribas BNPQY.

The settlements relate to various infractions committed by the banks; for instance, Bank of America’s case relates to how it dealt with mortgage-backed securities going all the way back to the lead up to the 2008 credit crisis.

Citi’s situation also deals with mortgage-backed securities, while BNP Paribas is suspected of ignoring U.S. sanctions on other countries, including Iran.

“I am impatient,” Mr. Holder told the Journal. “We’re talking about conduct that contributed to the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression. Not the sole cause, but contributed to it, so this is a priority, and that’s why I’m dedicating so much time to it.”

The story notes that Holder — a frequent target of criticism from the right who has served in his role since the beginning of the Obama administration — is expected to remain at his post through at least November’s midterm elections.